Jesus our Mother
The birth pangs of Holy Week
There are many ways to interpret the meaning of the death of Jesus. One of the earliest and most enduring interpretations, though also one of the most neglected, is to understand Jesus’ crucifixion as a kind of birthing. Jesus labors in his dying, as he did in his living, to give birth to something new: a new humanity, a new consciousness, a new creation. Jesus is our Mother.
In both the Gospels and St. Paul’s letters, Jesus is identified as the incarnation of the Wisdom of God, a male manifestation of the divine feminine. Just as Holy Wisdom, through whom all things were made, was present with God at the beginning of creation, so too, it is through Jesus that a new creation is being born. Christ is the new Adam, the human being who is male and female, reconciling and integrating our humanity in a nondual, unitive consciousness.
In struggling to find an image that could communicate the depth of divine love revealed in Jesus’ self-giving, many saints and mystics have turned to the language of childbirth. This may seem odd to us, but consider that in premodern history 2-3 out of every 100 births resulted in the death of the mother. Given that a woman typically gave birth 4-6 times in her life, this means that about 10% of women died in childbirth. Birth and death were closely related, and the sacrificial love of women who risked their lives in giving birth was readily apparent. Women died to give life. Jesus died giving birth to unitive consciousness in us, so that we may realize our identity as children of God. It really is not such a stretch to imagine that Jesus is our Mother.
This understanding is made explicit by St. Anselm of Canterbury, who prayed,
Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you; *
you are gentle with us as a mother with her children.
Often you weep over our sins and our pride, *
tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgment.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds, *
in sickness you nurse us and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying, we are born to new life; *
by your anguish and labor we come forth in joy.
And in Saint Julian of Norwich, who wrote in her Revelations of Divine Love:
Christ came in our poor flesh *
to share a mother’s care.
Our mothers bear us for pain and for death; *
our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.
Christ carried us within him in love and travail, *
until the full time of his passion.
And when all was completed and he had carried us so for joy, *
still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love.
All that we owe is redeemed in truly loving God, *
for the love of Christ works in us;
Christ is the one whom we love.
Here, we see clearly the “maternal” nature of Christ’s self-emptying, his descent into the depths of human suffering so that through sacrificial love he could bring us to life, healing us of our wounds and freeing us from our cultural programming. It is from the water of the womb of Jesus our Mother that we are baptized, and it is from his own body and blood that we are nourished in Holy Communion. In the words of St. John Chrysostom, “As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ increasingly nourish with his own blood those whom he has given life.” We are sanctified by the blood of the cross, like a child born awash in its mother’s blood.
Let me hasten to add that such self-giving love is not the preserve of biological women only. This is not a theological justification of women’s passivity and suffering in the service of giving life to men. The incarnation of Holy Wisdom in Jesus is the divine revelation of human dignity as male and female in the image of God, integrated in a unitive consciousness that is non-dual – dare I say, nonbinary. Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection is the explosion of divine, sacrificial love into history in such a way as to undermine patriarchal domination and death from the inside out.
We all are called to grow into the maturity of this integrated humanity, and become free to give ourselves away in our life and in our death for the sake of love – just like Jesus our Mother. In this self-giving love we discover the power we need for our healing and for the healing of the earth.
As we enter into the birth pangs of this Holy Week, what is being born in you?